


ellipses

by joyousNuance



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 05:52:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14395674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joyousNuance/pseuds/joyousNuance
Summary: If you live in a shitty New York apartment, you go up to the roof to unwind. This is, like, a state law.





	ellipses

The sun’s nearer to rising than it was to setting, but then that hardly means anything in New York. Hell’s Kitchen borders the Theater District, and true to form drama kids never have any respect for their neighbors. The lights, the camera, the action -- gang’s all here, folks. All that was missing was the rhythmic slap of a bed frame against paper-thin walls, which the sound of faraway traffic probably emulates well enough to count for those keeping score back home. Dave’s apartment on 47th might be a few blocks away from anything resembling a skyscraper, sure, but if Times Square was supposed to be a quarantine zone for the whole ‘city never sleeps’ bullshit then that infection well and truly spread out to the rest of the city ages ago.

Case in point his current status of slightly buzzed and nursing a cigarette on the rooftop of his apartment complex, but he muses that this whole fuckin’ city has insomnia anyway and what’s one more tired dumbass playing to the trope. Vaguely he wonders what time it is, but either he forgot his phone back inside or he can’t be bothered remembering which pocket it’s in. Hardly matters, he supposes. Midnight might as well be one in the morning might as well be half-an-hour before sunrise.

A long drag punctuates what amounts for silence up here. Well, punctuates. A long drag forms yet another dot on the ellipses would be more accurate, but Dave doesn’t exactly come up here for conversation. By his reckoning half the people on his floor are elderly and the other half only speak Thai and after six months Dave only just googled what _nah gliat_ means and, surprise, if it doesn’t mean ‘the handsome gentlemen in 5b’. Not exactly the types he’s keen to be shooting the shit with at -- judging by the length of cigarette -- three or so in the morning. The ambience of distant sirens and the occasional car horn is fine enough for tonight, anyway.

A warm breeze slides along as Dave releases a long, pent-up sigh. Stubbing out his cigarette on the concrete lip of the building, he flicks it in the direction of an ashtray before sinking deeper into the couch his old roommate had convinced him to help strongman up here. He’ll acquiesce that as far as ideas go the rooftop sofa was a good one: Dave’s spent a lot of time up here. He’s not angsty enough to call it brooding or New Age enough to call it meditation or even faux-philosophical enough to call it self-introspection and contemplation, but the quiet -- such as what amounts for quiet up here -- is nice.

His breathing is steadying enough to where his eyes are _just_ starting to droop when the service door opens with the loud clatter of metal. Light lances out into the dark like a harpoon, barbed illuminations seeping into his vision even after his eyes squeeze shut. If the sharp growl he feels in his throat is audible, it’s lost over the din of the heavy door slamming shut behind whoever the fuck has deigned to invade Dave’s own personal Fortress of Solitude -- it had _better_ not be that stoner asshole in the studio below him. Fuck That Guy. God, if the fucking clown in 4b has been getting high on this sofa Dave is going to flip his shit. Parkour right off the handle. A feat of manual dexterity that just ain’t never been seen before. Some serious Ninja Warrior shenanigans.

It takes his eyes a few seconds to readjust to the darkness after the assault of the open door, but when the figure steps into Dave’s vision she is framed against the glow of skyscrapers in a silhouette that makes him wish he still had his camera and that candids weren’t weird even in public contexts much less in this one because goddamn, as the poets say.

The woman clutches a violin by the neck and looks down over the city. Dave can’t get a bead on her expression at one-quarter profile but he imagines she’s as tired and unable to act upon it as he is. Several stories below, some asshole drives by with their high beams on, and Dave catches a glimpse of blonde hair briefly colored by the flash before she fades back into a shadow. He doesn't dare speak as the woman lets out a long, pent-up sigh, running a hand along the polished wood of the instrument before bringing it up to rest upon her collarbone. She lets out another quiet breath before the bow is drawn across the strings, filling the air with a single, solitary note.

It cuts through the air like a mournful knife.

The woman makes a minor adjustment to the instrument and then begins to play in earnest, drawing the bow along strings with a practised ease that comes only from years of practice. It doesn't take a genius to realize just by hearing her play that she’s good - better than good, even - and while Dave might not be a genius he can certainly appreciate genius where he sees it. Her eyes are closed and she sways, softly, in time with her melody as a rich fugue weeps from her fingers.

Dave suddenly feels as though he is invading, intruding on a place he should not be. Sure he was here first but no display of his is as impassioned -- unless you count really going to town on a pack of Camels with accompanying bottle of Scotch a zeal to be admired -- and he’s sort of definitely staring and not in a way that would invoke any sort of endearment, either. He checks his jaw just to make sure it isn’t hanging open for flies, but even still the shadowed silhouette that speaks in the sighing of horsehair against stranded steel has captured his attention perfectly, and acting on a kind of instinct he finds himself matching her slow sway as a weeping melody pulls him in syncopated motion, a marionette hung by the strings of a violin.

The music swells before it doesn’t. Dave’s never been to a proper recital before and his knowledge of classical music is mostly film scores and samples from hip-hop beats, but it’s nice. Somehow he doesn’t think he’ll hear a violin the same way again but then he remembers that he’s buzzed on a rooftop watching a girl he’s never met play an instrument in what she believes to be solitude and welp. There goes that feeling. A final echo of mournful strings fades into the backspace of ambient city noises. The girl -- the woman? The woman. Calling her a girl, even in this weird not-monologue, feels incorrect, but then again. Buzzed on a rooftop. -- clutches the violin by the neck and watches the vast array of New York City and sighs. It’s the type of sigh that would be better punctuated by a long drag, in Dave’s expert opinion on both long drags of cigarettes and existential sighs in general. God, speaking of.

His eyes don’t come off the silhouette until there’s already an unlit coffin nail in his mouth and he’s fumbling with a book of matches stolen from Rudy’s. He strikes, the small flare hissing in his hand as he raises it to his lips. The cigarette catches and smoke rushes in, filling lungs with another ellipsis. Shaking out the light Dave flicks the matchstick to the ground, exhaling the nicotine hit in a cloud.

She’s turned. The hiss of the match must have alerted her, and she’s turned, guarded, and now her eyes are locked onto his and Dave still can hardly make out her face against the backdrop of light that is the city but it’s enough to see an unmistakable purple staring back to digest his own unguarded reds. Ah, hell.

There are two possible ways this situation can pan out, and to the best of Dave’s knowledge he’s not living in a porno so realistically maybe just make that only the one possible way. She’s either going to scream or curse him out or simply stalk off back into the apartment and she’ll be justified in any or all of the above that’ll be that and he’ll never hear tonight’s haunting refrain again and damn if that ain’t actually sort of fucked up to think about like fuck, sure he’s buzzed and maybe dreaming (this whole encounter has been ethereal on a level that usually takes a quarter more of the bottle of Jack lying forgotten on a shitty patio table somewhere off to the left) but it’s been a long day/week/month and the contact of purple to red has stirred something left of center in his chest somewhere and just the fact that she’s come up here to do likewise as he, albeit an ellipsis of horsehair and maplewood rather than tobacco and malt whisky, is something in it itself that in another timeline he feels might be a connection but here they were in this one and simply by being here he feels that chance has been ruined, death by the misadventure of nearly falling asleep on the rooftop again because the mattress downstairs is lumpy and needs to be replaced and the a/c is broken for the third time this month and-

“Evening,” she says, cutting through the tangled skein of his thoughts like a blade through netting.

Hm. Unexpected. “Evening,” comes the halting reply after a moment of silence.

“More accurate to call it early morning, really. Everyone on my floor is sound asleep by now, which ought to put us at somewhere in the A.M. Two, three, maybe.

It’s not worded like an accusation, but the prick of inquisition finds its way to his ears regardless and he tries to play it off cool. “Sounds about right. Meanwhile that means I’ve got about three hours left before everyone on my floor starts waking up and waking _me_ up with them.”

She looks nonplussed, which Dave supposes is better than the initial prognosis of ‘anger and then nothing again for the rest of his days’. “I’m on 3.”

He winces. “5."

She winces. Sympathy? Huh. “That why you’re up here?”

He shrugs, takes ellipsis of a drag and exhale. “Yeah. Sorta but also not really. That why you’re up here?”

She does the same, shrugging, and he hopes it’s not a trick of the light to see the small curl of her lip skyward. She sits down on the concrete lip, back to the city, and carefully rests the violin and its bow against the wall aside her. “For the most part, yes. But also not really.” She regards him in short order, the cigarette between his knuckles, the bottle of whiskey and glass. It feels like an assessment. You get that kind of look in dives or clubs, sometimes, but Dave gets the distinct impression the rubric is different for this particular once-over. Damn if he could say why, though, or even whether or not he passes. “It’s a quiet place to practice. No distractions-” a police siren cuts her off from a few blocks away, and she rolls her eyes and amends, “- save for things like that. It’s nice.”

He files that information away in a place he won’t soon misplace or forget. “It’s nice,” he echoes, and goes to take a drag before he realizes that that’s a shitty place to leave a conversation hanging while you suck down some nicotine because you want to punctuate your words to make them seem less inane. “You practice a lot? Not just up here, I mean,” he’s quick to amend when her brow starts to quirk, “like in general. You’re pretty good. I, ah.” A cough to clear the throat and to signify he’s about to say some shit that’ll either come across as endearing or awkward bullshit. “I liked hearing you play. Don’t hear that kind of thing a lot.”

Breath escapes her nostrils in what might be described as a chuckle to the more lenient observer. “You’re very kind. I’d not been planning on a recital tonight, but I suppose I’m glad you enjoyed it regardless, mister..?”

“Dave.”

She’s impenetrable. “I’m glad you enjoyed it regardless, Dave. And yes, to answer from before. I try to make a habit of practicing, even only for a few minutes. It does those muscles no good to atrophy, and idle hands breed idler bowstrings, after all.”

“Sounds a good habit, if a layman’s opinion means shit-all to you.” He goes to take another drag, but reconsiders, gesturing towards it with a nod. “You don’t mind, right. I can stub it if you want.”

She shakes her head, a half-shrug of her shoulders cementing her lack of really caring one way or the other. “By all means. And it does, actually.” She breaks eye contact to glance down at the violin, turning her head as she continues. “That was an original piece, it turns out. I haven’t performed it for anyone, yet. At least, I haven’t performed it to anyone with my own knowledge,” she adds, taking his eyes for a second.

“In my defense, I _was_ here first,” Dave counters, mouth curling in a coy smirk around the cigarette.

It goes over as well as can be expected - better, even, because she stifles a snort behind those rolled eyes. “You certainly made no attempt to make your presence known. You might as well not have been, for all I was concerned.”

“Again, in my defense, but I was either halfway to falling asleep or this has all been a _very_ vivid dream.” On the off chance it is a dream, he sits upright and reaches over for the bottle of scotch and the empty glass, pouring out enough to nurse and offering it her way. “So I think I’m fair enough to being justified regardless.”

She chuckles, and with an expression that’s hard to read she stands, taking care not to knock over the violin. “A dream, you say,” she muses.

He nods as she accepts the glass. Their edges of their fingers touch for a brief moment around the wet glass, and where before he was reasonably certain to not be dreaming now he’s not as sure. “Yeah. Better pinch me, just to make sure.”

She lifts a brow and takes a sip of the scotch. “I’ll pass. Wouldn’t want to wake you up, now would I?” she says, a coy smirk hidden behind the rim of the glass.

He purses his lips and takes a drag. “If this is a dream you’re legally obligated to tell me, you know.” Exhaling smoke that drifts lazily skyward, he shifts his position to allow her some room to sit. “It’s entrapment otherwise and I know this because I have an ex who’s a lawyer so I’m well-versed in legalese bullshit thanks.”

She hums at that, pulling a shrug as she sits down against the opposite armrest, leaning back against it and pulling up her feet to tuck beneath her legs. “Oh, please, not the legalese bullshit. Anything but that.” She smirks, and, wow, he wonders, is this how people feel when he stonewalls and pulls out the cocky hard-to-get routine because he thinks it’s working. “But if you _must_ know,” she continues, heaving a beleaguered sigh, “I suppose I can clue you in on the secret. If only because you’re so clued into the legal ins-and-outs of the system; that ex of yours must have given away all our most valuable secrets if you can thread these loopholes with such aplomb.”

He holds up a hand, the cigarette hanging loose between his fingers. “Actually,” he says, catching her gaze and holding it, a brow raised her way, “I’d settle for just your name.”

Her gaze narrows onto his, the curl of her smile (and the gleam in her eyes) betraying the apparent edge to her vision. “Is that so.”

“It seems only fair,” he argues, gesturing with the cigarette. The glowing ember is reflected softly in her eyes, and while it’s still too dark to make out any color beyond the briefest snatches of purple there’s an artistry, he finds, to be found in them regardless, and he tears his eyes away to watch the burning end of the coffin nail safely delivered to a few inches shy of his mouth. “You’ve had my name since halfway into this conversation and yet I’m still over here mentally referring to you as ‘the girl in 3’, which is sort of a mouthful mentally speaking.”

She purses her lips to conceal another smile, but this one’s a bit easier to parse. “Mh, yes, four whole syllables. I sympathize for your mental state most assuredly, boy in 5.”

Now he was getting somewhere, and flashes teeth in a smirk that claims she has no idea what she’s about to get herself into. “I think it was Corambis that said brevity was the soul of wit, so I appreciate you conceding the point. Further, I-”

“Rose,” she says, interrupting.

He blinks. (Usually people let him say his lines and get the good banter jokes in.) “Rose?” he asks, more for clarification than anything.

“Rose,” she repeats. “Tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, boy in 5. My name is Rose. It’s a pleasure.” She extends her hand, and Dave, thrown for a proper loop, does the same, taking her hand with his own and trying not to stare, for all the luck he’s had in that department tonight.

“Pleasure’s all mine, Rose,” he says, and he briefly flirts with the idea of bringing up the other Shakespeare quote that she’s likely heard a thousand times already, but decides against it even as like an ironic thing. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“I’m sure it is,” she fires back, giving his hand a shake and plucking the cigarette from his knuckles as she leans back into position against the armrest, daring him react as she places it to her lips to take a deep drag. He very pointedly doesn’t, watching as she the lazily exhales a cloud that drifts upward into the night sky, curling the hand that had made contact with hers and looping it around the back of the couch. “Mind if I smoke?” she asks, dripping with sarcastic innocence.

He scowls. She laughs. The two seem related. He scowls deeper, and she laughs harder, confirming his suspicion and coloring his cheeks. Setting his gaze he makes to snatch the glass of scotch from her hand: it comes away easy, like she’d been expecting retaliation, and the flash of her teeth tell him that yes, she very much had been, and yes, she’s still laughing despite -- or, more likely, in spite of -- the heat rising in his cheeks. He nurses that particular inclination along with the scotch. Her lipstick has stained the rim of the glass, which he notices either too late or too early.

“You could have asked,” he begins, a faux-chagrin itching at pursed lips. “I have plenty to share.”

“Well, what’s that they say about it being easier to ask forgiveness than permission?” She punctuates it with an ellipsis of smoke and a smile that could be interpreted as coy. Coquettish, even, if Dave was the kind to push his luck, and really, wasn’t there something somewhere about fortune favoring the bold?

A chuckle is coaxed out of him. “Granted,” he says, and the word floats off skyward like the lazy tendrils of smoke as the two take a moment to nurse their respective vices, the sounds of the city never far behind to cover for the silence. Several stories below, someone with a very expensive stereo and very little respect for or understanding of human decency drives by, the sounds of bass and subwoofer echoing off the otherwise empty streets like tinny thunder. A car horn sounds twice in quick succession some blocks away. A warm breeze sighs across their faces.

“I do, actually,” Rose says unbidden, breaking the lulling minute of silence.

Dave blinks, shaking his head to rouse himself from his trance. “Sorry? You do what?”

“Practice often. Up here specifically, I mean. You asked about that earlier.”

Had he? He struggles to remember -- he can’t remember the specifics of the meandering conversation, but thinks it might have been in the weird early stage where he was trying to deduce whether or not she was about to break the violin over his skull and perhaps persuade her against that particular course of action. “Oh, right. Well hey that’s pretty cool. Fiddler on the roof.”

She winces. “You just _had_ to go there.”

“I calls them like I sees them, Rose. But nah, that’s neat. I do a little turntable work on the side but you can’t really. Set up on a roof whenever you feel like practicing a set at ass-o’clock in the morning. All you’ve got to deal with is the bow and whatever weird guy is half-asleep on the couch that night.”

She snorts. “I don’t mind an audience. Provided I know its there,” she adds after a moment, turning to catch his eye.

“Is that an invitation?” he asks, sitting up. The glass, now empty, he places back on the table, meeting the caught gaze and cocking a brow.

She shrugs, half-raising a shoulder. “It could be. It could also just be a light conversation. Be sure not to read to into things, Dave.”

The shape of his name in her mouth has him blinking again, wondering just where exactly his shades got to, goddammit. He averts his gaze. Well. It’s a step up from ‘boy in 5’, that’s for certain. “Right, right. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, yeah?”

“Sometimes a cigarette is just a cigarette,” she confirms, taking a final, deep drag as she stands. Tapping the rest of the ash into the tray, she drops the stub and grounds it beneath her heel, and Dave gets a sudden, panicky -- panicky? Christ, Strider -- feeling that he’s been reading the conversation wrong this whole time or that she’s been playing him like the violin she’s already demonstrated her proficiency in, played him for a fool and for a laugh but then she leans in, close to nearly touching against his ear, and there’s smoke still curling from her lips when she whispers in a voice that couldn't be anything to Dave but sultry: “but sometimes it isn’t.”

And then she’s gone. Dave almost doesn’t catch the metal trap of the service door swinging shut and the stabbing light in his eyes, blinding him for long enough for the silhouette of Rose to disappear like the dream he’s decided this almost certainly is. He reaches to refill the glass, but the scotch is empty. A police siren sounds somewhere in the distance, a car horn reporting shortly after. There’s a hot breeze in the air tonight, catching his hair.

Yeah. Definitely a dream. But damn, he reasons, eyelids already heavy, if it wasn’t a nice one.

* * *

 

He wakes up with the sun burning into his retinas and pigeons chattering sweet nothings in his ear. His head pounds against the confines of his skull like the rhythmic slapping of frame against wall, his mouth cotton balls, dryer lint, and sawdust. He scrambles to find his shades before his eyes melt from their sockets. Oh, shit, there they are, right by his phone facedown on the table. No wonder he couldn’t find it last night.

Last night? Memory _tsks_ at him, reproachful. Why? Had something happened? He struggles to think. He struggles to remember, on the way down from the roof to his apartment proper. He struggles with the faded polaroid of a silhouette against the backdrop of the city as he collapses into the bed, lumpy mattress and all because lying down is at least better than sleeping on that couch and he should really stop making a habit of that. He struggles with the idea of _someone,_ embers of a person -- a dream he can’t quite place.

He struggles with sleep, when it comes to him, and the rest of the day is spent in similar fashion, stuttering somewhere in the deep places of his mind. To top it off, the elevator’s broken down again, and the landlady called him _nah gliat_ again when he complained about the a/c. The clock ticks forward.

He gets home late that night, very late. He regards the elevator -- “I’m currently out of service! Please use the stairs.” -- with a look of betrayal before he begins the endeavor of five flights of stairs. An off day, all of it.

He’s halfway up the second flight when he hears it. A sigh of horsehair on maplewood, cutting through air like a scalpel, and he remembers. Violin. Scotch. Corambis. Girl in 3.

Rose.

He’s never been on 3 before, but it’s an apartment complex so that’s not really saying anything of any kind of import. He’s never been on floors 6 through 17 of the local Holiday Inn, either, but he can imagine it’s much of the same bad carpeting designs and rows of doorways. The music guides him to a door. Beyond he can hear the scraping of bow against string, carving the instrument into something that drifts out and calls him closer. What was that, again, about fortune and the bold?

He knocks.

The music stops.

The door opens.


End file.
